My company is strongly pushing AI. There are lot of experiments, demos, and effort from decently smart people about integrating it into our workflows. There are some impressive victories that have been made with AI tooling producing some things fast. I am not in denial about this. And the SE department is tracking improved productivity (as measured by # of tickets being done, I guess?)
The problem is I hate AI. I hate every fucking thing about it. Its primary purpose, regardless of what utility is gained, is spam. I think it’s obvious how google search results are spam, how spam songs and videos are being produced, etc. But even bad results from AI that have to be discarded, IMO, are spam.
And that isn’t even getting into all massive amounts of theft to train the data, or the immense amounts of electricity it takes to do training and inference, as well as run, all this crap. Nor the psychosis being inflicted onto people who emplace their trust into these systems. Nor the fact that these tools are being used to empower authoritarian regimes to track vulnerable populations, both here (in the USA) and abroad. And all this AI shit serves to enrich the worst tech moguls and to displace people like artists and people like myself, a programmer.
I’m literally being told at my job that I should view myself basically as an AI babysitter, and that AI has been unambiguously proven in the industry, so the time for wondering about it, experimenting with it, or opposing it is over. The only fault and flaw is my (i.e. any given SE’s) unwillingness to adapt and onboard.
Looking for advice from people who have had to navigate similar crap. Because I feel like I’m at a point where I must adapt or eventually get fired.
Ask ChatGPT “How do I unionize my workplace to protect my job against AI obsessed management?”
AI is a tool, just like a hammer. You could use a rock, but that doesn’t give you the leverage that a hammer does.
AI is also a machine, it can get you to your destination faster, like a car or train.
Evil people have used hammers, cars, and trains to do evil and horrible things. These things can also be used for useless stupid things, like advertising.
But they can also be used for good, like an ambulance or to transport food. They also make us more efficient and can be used to save resources and effort. It depends on who uses it and how they use it.
You can’t control how other people may misuse these things, but you can control how much you know, how you use it, and what you use it for.
AI is a tool like a Gun, more like, specifically designed for a terrible purpose, used for a terrible purpose, and with no way to use it for good except by deconstructing it and finding a new use for it
You’re the sane one.
I am also encouraged to use AI at work and also hate it. I agree with your points. I just had to learn to live with it. I’ve realized that I’m not going to make it go away. All I can do is recognize its limited strengths and significant weaknesses and only use it for limited tasks where it shines. I still avoid using it as much as possible. I also think “improved productivity” is a myth but fortunately that’s not a metric I have to worry about.
My rules for myself, in case they help:
- Use it as a tool only for appropriate tasks.
- Learn its strengths and use it for those things and nothing else. You have to keep thinking and exploring and researching for yourself. Don’t let it “think” for you. It’s easy to let it make you a lazy thinker.
- Quality check everything it gives you. It will often get things flat wrong and you will have to spend time correcting it.
- Take lots of deep breaths.
[Edit: punctuation]
I agree with all your points. The problem is that quality cheching AI outputs is something that only a few will do. The other day my son did a search with chat GPT. He was doing an analysis of his competitors within 20km radius from home. He took all the results for grated and true. Then i looked at the list and found many business names looked strange. When i asked for the links to the website, i found that some were in different countries. My son said “u cant trust this”. When i pointed it out to chatgpt, the dam thing replied “oh im sorry, i got it wrong”. Then you realise that these AI things are not accountable. So quality checking is fundamental. The accountability will always sit with the user. I’d like to see the day when managers take accountability of ai crap. That wont happen, do jobs for now are secure.
I remind my boss that giving AI full access to our codebase and access to environmemts, including prod, is the exact plot of the Silicon Valley episode where Gilfoyle gave Son of Anton access. His AI deleted the codebose after being asked to clean the bugs…deleting the entire codebase was the most efficient way of doing that.
I do know that I am the minority on Lemmy. I believe, there is a space for AI in our life. Of course it is not the way big corporations is trying to shove down in our throats.
The ethical and moral problems of AI is not part of your question.If you decide to work for your company that forces you to use AI, then you either use AI or get a new job.
That’s how capitalism works.You don’t have to like it. You just have to accept the “must use AI” as part of the things they are paying you for.
There is no metric aside of: they are Paying you to do this way.
If you don’t want to do that way - the ball is in your court.Edit: Browsing Lemmy I just saw this post. Maybe it will help you:
https://lemmy.ml/post/40233766The linked article is interesting food for thought.
My company does annual reviews. You have to write your own review, then they will read it over and then sit down to talk to you about it.
Last year, I just had ChatGPT write it for me based on all of my past conversations with it. Turned it in. The first question they asked me was, ‘Did you use AI to write this?’ Without hesitation, I said absolutely. They loved it so much, they had me show everyone else how to do it and made them redo theirs. I couldn’t frikin believe it. Everyone is still pissed they have to use ChatGPT this year, but the bosses love that corporate hogwash so much.
They’re about to receive a stack of AI-generated drivel so bad that I bet they have everyone go back to handwriting them.
That’s especially saddening because writing the review is specifically meant for you to contemplate what went well and perhaps what can go better next time. You would think managers would want you to reflect on that. For the benefit of the company, at minimum.
But with stories like yours it is becoming more clear that the only objective is to “use ai” or deliver ai-generated results. Why even bother caring or trying when management does not?
That’s exactly the attitude everyone has now
If you don’t mind me asking, what do you do and kind of AI? Maybe it’s the autism but I find LLMs are bit limited and useless but other use cases aren’t quite as bad Training image recognition into AI is a legitimately great use of it and extremely helpful. Already being used for such cases. Just installed a vision system on a few of my manufacturing lines. A bottling operation detects cap presence, as well as cross threads or un-torqued caps based on how the neck vs cap bottom angle and distance looks as it passes the camera. Checking 10,000 bottles a day as they scroll past would be a mind numbing task for a human. Other line is making fresnel lenses. Operators make the lenses, and are personally checking each lens for defects and power. Using a known background and training the AI to what distortion good lenses should create when presented is showing good progress at screening just as well as my operators. In this case it’s doing what the human eye can’t; determine magnification and defraction visually.
The AI in this case is, for all intents and purposes, using Copilot to write all the code. It is basically beginning to be promoted as being the first resort, rather than a supplement.
I don’t know enough about copilot as work has made it optional for mostly accessibility related tasks: digging through the mass of extended Microsoft files in teams, outlook, OneDrive to find and summarize topics; record meeting notes, not that they’re overly helpful compared to human taken notes due to a lack of context; and normalizing data, as every power BI report out is formatted as it’s owner saw fit.
Given it’s ability to make ridiculous errors confidently, I don’t suppose it has the memory to be used more like a toddler helper? Small, frequent tasks that are pretty hard to fuck up, once it can reliably do these through repetition and guidance on what’s a passing result, tieing more together?
Just don’t.
Don’t change your morals just cause of peer pressure, especially not corporate pressure
Same as everything else in life - like the bits that are useful to you and ignore the rest.
As for doing what you’re told at work, who said we had to like it provided it’s a reasonable request?
I’m at a point where I must adapt
What’s wrong with adapting? The one constant in life is that things change. This is a change and you’re not the only person who has faced their job changing - at least you still have it. Adapt or go raise goats.
Treat it like an especially junior dev that just graduated University.
It knows simple boilerplate stuff pretty well, but never trust it implicitly.
People keep saying this. I don’t want to work with an especially junior dev. I’ve been doing that my while career and the only thing good about it is that they get better.
Step one: get a hammer
Step two: smash noggin with hammer
Step 3: continue to smash your noggin with hammer
Step 4: keep smashing
Step five: you are now a tech bro who loves AI.
The problem is I hate AI. I hate every fucking thing about it. Its primary purpose, regardless of what utility is gained, is spam.
You are describing one type of AI, that being Generative AI. Even more specifically, Generative AI from publicly trained models, examples being ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok. If you hate those, don’t use those. This isn’t the only AI that exists.
We’re getting into data science here, but you can build and train Machine Learning models exclusively on your own data. So no theft/spam contamination here. If your needs are in the Generative AI space, you could even build and deploy your own Fine Tuned model from your own data on top of one of the public models, so it would have knowledge of your business or industry.
All AI incarnations are just tools. You don’t start with a tool. You start with a problem to solve, and you use a tool to assist or make it better. So the beginning of this journey is asking the question: “What problem are you trying to solve?”
Pull up your big boy pants and use it?
Or don’t. And if you’re right about it not being a productivity boost then your numbers will reflect that.
AI is pretty bad most things you do that are actually valuable so your critique definitely holds. It’s bad for the environment and creates tech consolation and all round is creating around as many problems as it claims to solve.
AI as in neural networks are really good in most ways such as playing chess and detecting melonomas but I’m going to give some tips for spocifically LLMs.
Treat it as a dumb intern. You ask it to find research papers but you have to read them yourself to actually assess them. You can use it to draft an email but you still have to proofread it. You can use it to write code but expect bugs and unhandled edge cases.
I’m a software developer and I use an LLM to create code generators, internal tooling, a thing that takes a json and outputs SQL insert statements or to look up docs. The AI has not increased my productivity per se but the tooling I created with it has.
Another use case is to ask for critique, you paste some code block in and ask it to review performance for example and it can spot the “use a hash map there” cases pretty easily.
That’s my 2 cents on the topic.
